Before the internet, if you wanted to establish your credentials as an expert or distribute your thinking and insights to those who might find it valuable, you had more or less two options:
- become a public speaker at events, or
- get involved with a publisher
While not eliminating either, the internet has democratized both of those options.
But why hasn’t the internet eliminated these methods altogether? And why, for the most part, do both public speaking and traditional publishing still carry more credential weight than simply posting content online?
There are doubtless a myriad of reasons, but I think most of them probably boil down to this:
They impose a rigid set of standards that must be adhered to before the content can be distributed to and consumed by others.
Here’s the thing about standards though: all standards are artificial.
In other words, you can create your own standards for your content. The key is showing a visible, tangible threshold of quality and restraint in scope regarding what kinds of content is allowed to be released.
The more visible the standard, whatever that standard is, the higher the credibility of the source.
Try it out for yourself. Evaluate your level of trust in the people and brands that you follow, and then compare that trust to the amount of visible standards in the content that they post. Let me know if it checks out.
